The Restless Traveler ii

Continued from yesterday, a short essay attributed to me but long ago out of my computer. A Canadian grad student studying the occupation of the Netherlands, asked me for the proper bibliographical data, which I don't have. I remember the incident he described, but I have no copy of any essay I might have written. 

He sent me the essay. I knew it was a piece I wrote, but I hadn't seen for 16 years.  

Yesterday I passed along the first half. Here's the second. What I remembered was the restless traveler's discomfort at the comportment of the man who told the story of the Dakota's attack on his hometown, New Ulm, Minnesota--just the way he told the story, just his demeanor. It was reminiscent of the way the German occupiers acted/spoke/behaved. He couldn't handle it.

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Achingly, painfully tethered. By choice, right then, he would have deserted the whole bus if he could avoid pain that was closing in on him—ancient, deadly fears long ago thought put to rest, but suddenly awakened by tone and rhetoric and ethnic pride.

When we got out of the bus at the college chapel, I could see he was not to be reasoned with. Some spirit in him was out of control—and he knew it too.

“When we arrived at this most beautiful Lutheran chapel,” he wrote, “I made sure to stay in the back on a church bench, so I could escape the professor’s diatribe attack on my senses. I fretted about myself—within my own, why I do not have more patience.”

And then, “Finally he stopped talking,” the Dutchman wrote.

The retired prof had stopped because we'd entered the Martin Luther College chapel, where, serendipitously, which is to say, providentially, the college’s own fine organist just happened to show up. That man opened up that new huge organ in a fashion that no guitar and drum set can ever do. Together, we sang old hymns, even “A Mighty Fortress,” Luther’s own. It was a blessing I have not the words to describe.

But our war survivor tries—listen:

“Then the college organist played this beautiful very large pipe organ, with songs so wonderful. Peace came in my heart, and I thanked God for his patience with me, being a ‘Restless Traveler.’ Those familiar songs released my anxiety,” he wrote.

Those old hymns of faith were decidedly providential therapy. What he required at that point—and he understood it himself—was therapy.

That retired history prof never wore the black SS coat and had nothing to do with The Final Solution. He was an American, doing what lots of us do—taking pride in his heritage, including the town’s own history, which started a full century before a little madman with a paintbrush mustache.

But there’s a little more to the story of our restless traveler.

Henceforth we were transported to the Shell Brewery, where, following a short tour, we were led thirstily to their tasting room for some product research.

“We were invited to taste small amounts of different types of beer,” our restless traveler wrote, quelling, for a moment at least, his old fears and hatred. “It tasted good and put me in a mood to sing a song, song from my younger days—not quite proper for elderly Christian persons perhaps, but seemed funny.”

There’s nothing like a little sip to help you forget, maybe, eh?

But the charmer was the evening, when, accompanying some fine German drinking songs, a motley crew of masked intruders, the Naaren, ended our German dinner by pulling every last one of the weary travelers from their chairs and waltzing them into a series of hoopla dances and marches that would have sent all of our travelers reeling had they carted in a keg or two with them. Which they hadn’t, thank goodness.

Here's the way the Dutchman described the hijinks:

“A dozen characters, men and women, although whether man and woman was difficult to distinguish, were wearing wetween our dinner tables, encouraging us to join. It took me a while before I was reaooden masks and colorful costumes. They entered the hall dancing, and hobbled bdy to accept their invitation, until I secured a woman who was a good dancer. I managed to get a hold of her. Her mask was not as scary as the other ones. When the music stopped, she gave me a compliment about my dancing. It made my day.”

It made his day.

And thus, presumably, our restless traveler, so psychically stricken earlier in the day, was comforted finally, by the great hymns of the church, a few sips of good stout German beer, and a sporty jaunt with a masked intruder—a woman he managed to get hold of, he says, who then told him that for an old guy with a wooden leg, he was, by cracky, one heckuva good dancer.

That's the whole story. Let preachers of all types and persuasions do with it what they will. All I know is, that’s the way I saw it, and the way he tells it.

There’s got to be a sermon there, if we have ears.